Leaving the 34th Street AMC Theater after watching Kick-Ass, I couldn’t help but think “Ugh, that was way too much popcorn.”
Before the movie, I bought a large popcorn to split with Julie and Bryan, and put in on the ground in front of my seat as I got situated. Unfortunately, someone sat down in the seat in front of me and leaned back, sending my popcorn flying. Picking up the bag, I saw that about a quarter of the bag’s contents were now in a nice pile between my legs. This is all before I took a piece of popcorn out of the bag.
I went back to the concession counter, explained what happened and asked the guy if he wouldn’t mind topping me off. He said sure, and while refilling the bag, realized it was a large and told me that there are free refills on large popcorns. Still, it was nice that initially he was refilling the bag out of kindness than out of policy-awareness, so I’m giving the concession staff at this AMC a big A+.
The free refill policy would prove to be my undoing.
By the time we hit the Iron Man preview, half our popcorn was gone, and not to the floor this time. I turned to Bryan and Julie and asked if I should get a refill before the movie started. They didn’t answer, so I asked again. Julie pointed out that if I have to ask more than once if we should refill the popcorn, clearly I want more popcorn. Point taken. I ran out for a refill.
As I was walking to the concession stand, I took fistfuls of popcorn in my mouth. Hey, if they’re going to refill it to the top, then I’m just leaving popcorn in the bin if I don’t do this, right?
The concession guy filled me back up quickly and I made it back inside the theater, only missing half of the Iron Man preview, which I’ve already seen many, many times in the past few weeks.
About a third of the way through Kick-Ass, our Sprite was running low and Julie decided to get a refill. The popcorn was about half full, so I asked her to refill that as well. Hey, if she’s going out there anyway, right?
At the 1:10 mark, my stomach said “Please, I beg you, no more popcorn.” I complied. Looking at the bag, there was about half a bag left. I think that both times we refilled, there was about a third to half a bag remaining. That’s a lot of popcorn not in the bag. It seemed fitting that I had a mound of popcorn under my feet, because at this point, I felt like I was all popcorn.
Take heed of my tale of woe and be wary of the free refill policy at AMC.
“Um, that’s great, but I’m here to read about Kick-Ass.” Right. Sorry about that.
While the violence starts out pretty realistic as first (underweight crime fighter with no fighting skills is quickly sent to the hospital), it gets more and more over the top as the movie goes on. They’re pretty slick about it though. I didn’t notice how ridiculous things had gotten until towards the end, when Hit-Girl runs down a hallway, firing her handguns until they’re empty, pops the cartridges, tosses two new ones in the air, catches them inside the guns and keeps firing.
If they make a Kick-Ass sequel, they should let Kick-Ass retire to the countryside and focus solely on Hit-Girl. Hit-Girl is awesome to the same extent that Kick-Ass is annoying. Anytime she came on screen, the audience in my not so packed theater howled. But what else would you expect when an 11-year old dressed like Robin calls someone a cunt before eviscerating him.
I’m putting it out there right now; you will see at least one Hit-Girl at whatever Halloween party you find yourself at this year. It’s going to be this year’s Heath Ledger as The Joker.
Speaking of The Joker, towards the end, Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s character, Red Mist, says “Wait ‘til they get a load of me,” and I thought “How many lines are they going to steal from Batman?” until I realized that is was Bryan who said “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” and not someone onscreen.
I enjoyed Kick-Ass and think you should see it if you like movies based on comic books (in which case you’ve probably already seen it), the action scenes in films by Robert Rodriguez, or movies about fathers with creepy moustaches and the daughters who kill for them.
